The unusual ideas of EKO sound editor

Modern Mixer

Mario Blätterman

If you can master the idiosyncrasies of this software, then you will be able to edit audio files in a flash.

Linux has a whole range of applications that are used for recording and editing sounds. Among others, these include Audacity, which sets very high performance standards for the genre, and KWave, which comes from the KDE community. Work on the competitor EKO [1] has been ongoing for the last six years, but most larger distributions still take a pass on the software. This reluctance even applies to Arch Linux, where you will need to build the program from the source code (see the "Installation" box).

Initial Start

The program makes a somewhat strange impression when it is first opened (Figure 1). The interface's layout closely resembles other similar programs. But in spite of the Qt basis, EKO looks more like a post-modern Java Swing GUI that doesn't appear to fit in with the rest of the desktop. The user-interface widgets match fairly well with the desktop. However the same cannot be said for the icons.

You will experience more weirdness when you open an audio file using File
| Open
. Instead of giving you a selection window, the software jumps to the Files
tab in the bar on the right and embeds the dialog directly in the main window. The opened file gets displayed in a timeline and is divided into channels (Figure 2).

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